Home Free
by kammoe
Summary: Sam, not really Sam, keeps screwing himself over, and Dean just wants this all to be over. (and maybe some vacation too) Soulless!Sam


**set early season 6**

If they find _one_ more of these cocksuckers, Dean's going to shoot something.

He growls in frustration as he wipes spatters of ghoul blood from his face and neck, spitting out the little globs that got in his mouth. God _,_ he _hates_ this job. It's never anything easy, either. He and Sam are goin' round the country, saving people, and if destiny, or chance, or _whatever_ got them into this mess in the first place, could just give them something easy to kill, maybe life wouldn't be so stressful.

Not to mention that Dean's got the part time job of looking for his brother's soul.

Sometimes Dean wonders how much he wants to bring back Sam's soul, the pros, and cons weighing themselves out in his head. When they get Sam's soul back, because it's _going to_ happen, (goddamn it, they've both sacrificed too much for it to end like this) the kid's gonna be messed up. Dean spent four crappy, an understatement really, months in hell, and that felt like an eternity. Sam's been there for over a year, and Dean's not really sure how he's going to deal with everything when he gets out. Him being a blood junkie had been traumatizing enough.

Dean's snapped out of his reverie when something slams into him and throws him into the next room of the abandoned house. He doesn't even have time to register that his machete's been thrown from his hand and that now he's defenseless, all he can think about is that the rickety two story house is going to collapse any minute now. When he and Sam took the job, they didn't exactly consider the risk factors of the whole situation. It looked fine, really.

The description was of strange deaths, the _usual_ , in Key Largo, Florida and a beach trip seemed long overdue. At least that's what Dean told himself anyway. He found it to be a welcome distraction from the _complete_ lack of leads on the douche who pulled Sam outta Lucifer's cage.

Dean's not really sure he should be calling the mystery man a douche, but the guy who's supposed to be his brother, the guy who's been hunting with him for the past couple of months, is practically a stranger.

Dean hears slashing and kicking coming from somewhere near, and he's sure the house moves even more. It takes a second for him to feel the almost metal-like little hands around his neck, and one more for him to sigh in dejection. He's gonna have to kill a little girl.

She's part of the ghoul family, the subjects of the hunt, and a tiny, tiny thing that Dean does not want to kill. It's hard to forget she's not human, and that he's going to have to slice off her head when he recovers his machete. There's her, the older brother, and both the parents, who they've already ganked.

Dean stares into the little girl's murderously giddy eyes and gropes around the floor for his machete, stars dancing in front of his eyes when oxygen no longer supplies itself to his lungs. If things were normal, he'd be doing all sorts of last resort things to kill the kid, but instead he waits patiently for Sam to come and finish her off.

Sure enough, the kid's head comes flying off and small fingers release their death grip on Dean's throat. Colors fly back into his vision and along with them he sees Sam standing in front of him, an unamused expression plastered on his features.

"What the hell took you so long?" Dean says as he motions for Sam to help him up from the ground where he's still kinda struggling to catch his breath. Sam cocks his head in that way that tells Dean that he's not sure whether he should be offended or not so Dean just ignores him, wobbling up by himself.

"I got thrown out the other kid's window." Sam says as if that means abso- fucking-lutely _nothing,_ and Dean's suddenly sputtering because _what the fuck_.

"You got thrown out a win— What the fuck?" Dean's grabbing his brother by the shoulders and looking him over, internally cringing at the forming bruises on the left side of Sam's face.

"Well yeah, but then I killed the brother and came back to kill the girl." Sam states matter of factly, giving Dean a confused glance. Dean _really_ wants to shoot something now, and there's no more ghouls to decapitate because his _idiot_ brother was busy falling out windows trying to kill them.

Sam shouldn't even be here, shouldn't even be walking, let alone rolling his neck like he just played a light game of golf.

"How are you—"

Right. As soon as it seems like a good time to ask why the hell Sam's perfectly fine, Dean remembers. Soulless.

He throws him glance that might have come out as slightly disgusted, not that this Sam cares, and picks up his machete from where it lies on the floor, almost slipping on the ghoul's blood.

"Whatever. Let's get the hell out of here." Dean says it almost like an instruction and doesn't even turn to look at his brother, walking out the door and going down the stairs as fast as his sore body will let him.

They throw the weapons in the trunk and get in the Impala, Dean putting the keys in the ignition angrily. He's not really sure what he's angry about, or who he's angry with. If anything he should be happy. They ended a whole ghoul family, Sam somehow avoided near death, and besides the bruises, he looks like his dandy soulless self.

They're alive.

—

"It's the very tip of Florida, Dean, of course it's going to be hot," Sam rolls his eyes as if talking to an incompetent five year old. Dean pops open the beer and takes a loud slurp, trying to annoy Sam. Oh, wait, that's not even possible. Not anymore. Sam just stares at him as if he's suffering from mild heat stroke.

"Yeah I know that but— Crack open that window, will you?" Dean takes a look at the setting sun outside the window and decides its safe to slide open a window for now.

"It's August, it shouldn't be this hot." Dean's gone through two cold showers, an accidental dip in a lagoon when hunting the ghouls, and so many iced drinks he doesn't think his bladder can take anymore, yet he's still burning.

Sam may not feel most things, but Dean can tell he's melting too. His brother is peeling off his jacket, which God only knows why he was wearing it in the first place, and sweat soaks his flannel. Dean's nose wrinkles in up in discomfort and he rummages through one of their duffles, finding a fresh shirt and throwing it at Sam who's reflexes are still in tune.

Sam catches it and pulls off his flannel, and that's when Dean notices something is very, _very_ wrong. Sam's wrist is bent at an angle that the human body is _not_ supposed to allow and it's twice it's regular size.

"What did you do?" Dean's words come out slowly, and somehow it's like the time he saw Sam drinking demon blood, all going in slow motion. It's clearly a broken wrist, but if he didn't tell Dean about something as clearly wrong as that then what else is going on that he doesn't know about?

"What did you do?" Dean repeats it louder this time, more panicky, and abandons his beer on the table, making his way over to Sam so fast he almost knocks over a chair.

"I told you earlier, I fell out a window. It's nothing some ice won't fix." Sam says it so nonchalantly, it's like he's talking about slapping a band-aid on a paper cut.

Once Dean's up close, he can see just how bad the wrist really looks. It could be made out of jello it's so deformed, and it's not just the side of Sam's face that's bruised, it's his whole arm too. If Dean's intuition is anything to go by, his whole left side is a mess of ugly, discolored skin.

"No, no, no, Sam what did you do?" Dean pulls his brother to sit on the bed, lifting up the hem of his shirt, confirming his earlier guesses as to what the extent of Sam's injuries really are. His ribs are black and blue, a watercolor painting of bursted veins.

"Dean, it's fine really, just some ice, and then we can move on, in fact I think I already found us a hunt up in Kissimmee-"

Dean can't believe this. Winchesters really are cursed.

"No Sam, Jesus Christ, this isn't something you slap an ace bandage on and then hope it heals in a week! Look at your fucking wrist, that shit's broken!" Dean's yelling now, ignoring the possibility of annoyed guests in neighboring rooms.

"Well, but it doesn't hurt, and your always telling me to be empathetic, and this is me trying," Sam rips Dean's hand away from his shirt and places his broken one on his lap calmly, not even letting Dean reply to his statement that didn't even _make sense_.

"I'm being empathic towards you because you feel bad for me, so I'm supposed to be nice right? And you hate being held back for hunts, I know you do, so I'm just doing us both a favor and ignoring this." Sam says it with a morbid sort of finality and if Dean wasn't teetering over the edge before, now he's diving off a cliff.

"No, and no, ok? This is not how this works." Dean snaps and hauls Sam up like a rag doll, gripping Sam's good arm and dragging him along to the door.

" _You_ don't get to decide what to do. We're going to the hospital, you're getting checked out and then we're getting the hell out of this godforsaken town." Dean kicks open the door and pulls his brother, stopping when he realizes Sam isn't moving along with him.

"Why do you care so much?" Sam's looking at Dean blankly and his indiscernible hazel eyes seem to stare right through him. "You say I'm not really him, so why do you care so much?" Sam asks again, and Dean is trying to formulate an answer that won't make him sound like a douche. He, however, finds that he can't, and it doesn't really matter anyway.

"Because." Dean says roughly, staring at the ground so hard he might just burn holes in the gross-looking motel carpet.

"You're not him. Not to me. And if I get Sam back—" Dean stops short and clenches his fists, trying not to let his eyes wander anywhere away from the spot they're dead set on. " _When_ I get Sam back, he's going to need a healthy body. Not a misaligned arm and broken ribs. He's gonna have enough shit on his mind." Dean spits, because _this_ , this whole situation is really wearing him down.

"And what if you don't get him back? What if I'm like this forever?" Sam's question comes wrapped up in that cold tone that Dean hates and suddenly all he wants is _out_.

"Get in the fucking car RoboCop."

—

After tests and scans and a bunch of other shit Dean's not even sure they can _afford, (_ because let's face it, there's more important things than checking how valid your fake insurance is) he and Sam sit quietly in an exam room. As soon as a nurse took a peek at Sam's fucked up wrist, she led them right to a doctor who took Sam away while Dean was left to fill out the customary mound of papers and forms.

Sam sits on the bed, slouched back against the headrest, and to anyone besides Dean he'd look sad, depressed even, but that's not possible.

Soulless.

The word starts to lose meaning after a while.

Sam's disfigured looking arm is resting on a pillow, a bag of ice almost completely covering it and his eyes flick towards the window every few seconds, the sun glinting off of them in a way that makes him look almost like his Sam. This isn't his Sam.

The doctor comes in after a few minutes, closing the door quietly behind him. He's an old, wrinkled man who looks kinda fed up and somehow, Dean relates.

"So Doc. What's Sammy's verdict here?" Dean means to be sarcastic and both the doctor and Sam glance up at him weird so he just shuts his mouth and lets the doctor explain what Sam did to himself now.

"Well, Mr… Lusher, you took quite the fall down some-" The doc glances at the clipboard in his hands and raises a hand to his fading beard, itching it in concern.

"Out of a window?" He looks at Sam, worried and then back at Dean with a hint of scared in his eyes.

"We were fixing up our ma's house. Purely an accident." Dean adds, crossing his arms as if daring the doctor to question him, and when Sam simply nods, he takes it.

"Ok well, regardless, you took a nasty fall, but it's not as bad as it looks. No internal bleeding, just some pretty deep bruising that'll last a while." The doctor hands Dean a sheet with some instructions on how to speed up recovery and Dean takes it, eyeing all the tiny bullet points with apprehension. He knows he'll try all of it anyways though.

"The arm however… Things could have gone a lot worse if you hadn't come in when you did. We're going to cast it and that'll definitely take a while to heal, but in the long run you should be ok." The doctor looks up at Sam and squints as if he's seeing something that's not really there, but shakes his head quickly when he catches Dean's eye.

"Anything wrong, doc?" Dean asks tentatively, unsure what he's suspicious of. The doctor eyes him warily and crosses his arms, taking into account the way Dean sits forward in the plastic chair.

"On this chart it says that your brother barely felt any pain when he came in? That's a serious fracture, and his side alone…" The doctor wants to suggest that Sam was doing something else when he fell out the window, Dean can read between the lines.

"He just has a high pain tolerance. That's all." Dean lies through his teeth and Sam is about to open his mouth and protest but Dean shoots him a look.

"Extremely high, it seems." The doctor mutters under his breath and Dean gives him a funny face, wondering how things would have been if Sam actually had his soul, if Sam was actually Sam.

He probably would have suffered way more, Dean thinks, so it's good that when they get his soul back, he'll only have a broken arm. Except Sam's soul is in hell, and Dean doesn't think here'a place where he could possibly suffer more. His hands are shaking and he has to sit on them to get it to stop.

This whole soulless thing is getting real old.

—

 **wait for part 2, i guess**


End file.
